How The Time Traveler makes these phone wallpapers with SI tools

Every wallpaper in this gallery starts as a written prompt and ends as a tall file on your lock screen. Here's what happens in between.

It starts with Midjourney

The Time Traveler got a Midjourney account in September 2022 and has used it ever since. The Time Traveler creates these wallpapers with Midjourney, which leaves a lot of room for high-quality images.

The wallpapers began almost by accident. The Time Traveler shared Midjourney images on X, people kept asking for them, and the images started coming out shaped to fit a phone screen.

Writing the prompt

A prompt is a written description of the image. The Time Traveler's prompts go back to #PromptSHARE, a daily series that started in 2023 with camera-and-lens portrait prompts. In October 2024 the series turned to phone wallpapers, with each prompt tucked into the image's alt text on X. That run became the most-liked stretch of the series, led by abstract designs.

The prompts that work best as phone wallpapers share three habits:

A tight palette of two or three named colors, so the image stays calm behind the clock and app icons.
Negative space, so the clock, notifications and icons have somewhere quiet to sit. Words such as minimalist, smooth and dark background push the image that way.
The right shape from the start. A phone screen is tall, so The Time Traveler sets a tall aspect ratio and generates each phone wallpaper in that frame instead of cropping a wide image later.

From prompt to wallpaper

Here's how one recent phone wallpaper came together, step by step.

The Time Traveler writes a short scene prompt: “two dark lacquered planes meeting at a soft angle low in the frame, a thin seam of warm ember light where they touch, deep black void above, minimal, techno-modern, cinematic, calm.”
He sets a tall 9:20 frame for phones, blocks people, text, fonts and numbers, and adds some variety with a chaos value of 40 and a personal style.
He picks the best image from the results, varies or reframes it, and runs it in HD.

The Midjourney prompt panel with the scene prompt and its settings — The prompt and its settings. Created with Midjourney.

A dark phone wallpaper with two glowing ember-red curves meeting low in the frame — The finished image. Created with Midjourney.

Picking the keepers

Midjourney returns a grid of four images for each prompt. The Time Traveler picks the ones that hold up behind a lock screen: strong at a glance, quiet where the clock and icons go and free of obvious flaws.

4K and High Resolution

Each keeper gets upscaled to a full-size file. The Time Traveler then exports each wallpaper in Desqueeze Pro as a full-resolution PNG: 1932x4294 pixels, Automatic (HDR) color and 300 DPI.

Files that measure at least 1932x4294 pixels carry the 4K label. Smaller files carry the High Resolution label and never the 4K label.

Naming and sorting

Each new keeper gets a real title, plus a one-line tagline and a short description of what the image shows. The publishing check rejects raw file names. Each wallpaper then joins one or more of six categories: Abstract, Space, Architecture, Technology, Nature and Gradient.

Checking for repeats

Before any drop goes live, an automated check compares the new wallpapers with everything already published. It blocks files with identical bytes, images that look nearly the same under a different name and repeats of the same Midjourney job. The check also confirms that each Download button delivers the bare wallpaper, never a mockup.

Mockups

The front page and each Telegram post lead with a mockup: the new wallpaper shown on a phone screen, so you can judge how it looks in use. The cards and downloads in the gallery always show the wallpaper by itself.

The daily drop

Five new phone wallpapers post to the Telegram channel at 9 a.m. Eastern time. Each post pairs a mockup photo with the full-size wallpaper file, and each uses the same title the gallery shows. The gallery adds the new wallpapers to the top of the home page and the Gallery page at 10 a.m. Eastern. Nothing published earlier disappears from the Gallery.

Why it's called SI

The Time Traveler calls these tools SI, short for Super Intelligence. What keeps The Time Traveler going is bigger than pictures: a fascination with the potential Super Intelligence brings to the future of humanity. Each wallpaper is a small window onto that future.

Get the full-size files

Every wallpaper page links to its full-size file on Telegram. Follow the Telegram channel to get each day's drop as it lands.